The biography of booker t washington

Booker T. Washington’s Parents and Early Life

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born on April 5, 1856 in a hut in Franklin County, Virginia. His mother was a cook for the plantation’s owner. His father, a white man, was unknown to Washington. At the close of the Civil War, all the enslaved people owned by James and Elizabeth Burroughs—including 9-year-old Booker, his siblings, and his mother—were freed. Jane moved her family to Malden, West Virginia. Soon after, she married Washington Ferguson, a free Black man.

Booker T. Washington’s Education

In Malden, Washington was only allowed to go to school after working from 4-9 AM each morning in a local krydda works before class. It was at a second job in a local coalmine where he first heard two fellow workers discuss the Hampton Institute, a school for formerly enslaved people in southeastern Virginia founded in 1868 by Brigadier General Samuel Chapman. Chapman had been a leader of Black troops for the Union during the Civil War and was

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Booker T. Washington

American educator, author, orator and adviser (1856–1915)

Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.

Born into slavery on April 5, 1856, in Hale's Ford, Virginia, Washington was freed when U.S. troops reached the area during the Civil War. As a young man, Booker T. Washington worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and attended college at Wayland Seminary. In 1881, he was named as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an institute for black higher education. He expanded the college, enlisting students in construction of buildings. Work at the college was considered fundamental to students' larger education. He attained national prominence for his Atlanta Address of 1895, which attracted the attention o

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Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915, Educator. Booker Taliaferro Washington was the foremost black educator of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also had a major influence on southern race relations and was the dominant figure in black public affairs from 1895 until his death in 1915. Born a slave on a small farm in the Virginia backcountry, he moved with his family after emancipation to work in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia. After a secondary education at Hampton Institute, he taught an upgraded school and experimented briefly with the study of law and the ministry, but a teaching position at Hampton decided his future career. In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on the Hampton model in the Black Belt of Alabama.

Though Washington offered little that was innovative in industrial education, which both northern philanthropic foundations and southern leaders were already promoting, he became its chief black exemplar and spokesman. In